Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  Their food was slow in coming. “Subito, signora,” the waiter chanted, and brought more wine. Jane had promised to take some cousins of Roger’s, virtual strangers passing through for two nights and a day, on a quick tour of the splendors. It was now half past one, and she had begun to fidget. Francis watched her a full tolerant minute before she looked up, blushed, and blurted out, as if anything that came to mind would do, “Then you aren’t going back to America next month?”

  He ran a hand through his cropped hair. “Why? Did I say so?”

  “I thought you had, after reading your sister’s letter.”

  “What!” cried Xenia. “Aren’t we all planning to go back together? I booked my passage last month. For two weeks from today, out of Naples.”

  “So did I, but Francis didn’t.”

  “I’m afraid to go back,” he laughed apologetically.

  “Well, I wish you had told me,” said Xenia, glaring briefly at Jane. “Now it’s too late to make other plans. We’re in July already. It seemed like such a good idea, our cozy little group, absorbing the shock together.”

  Francis winced. But he hated not to oblige. “I’ll see about it this afternoon. You’re both in,” he faltered, “second class?”

  “Good heavens, no!” said Xenia, thinking to put his mind at rest. “Do you think we’re millionaires? Besides, on the Italian line, there’s no difference between second and third.”

  He saw Jane smile. He had had to confess to her his taste for first-class carriages. Francis had few extravagances, had indeed picked, on their trips, hotels not even amusingly squalid—but let them board a train! “Do you mind?” he would ask, sinking with an embarrassed grin into red plush, as he paid the difference on both tickets, “so as not to have to talk to people …!”

  “Write it down, Francis,” she said firmly, offering him her pen. Jane repeated for him the name of the ship, the date of sailing, and when at length he looked up with the distant fixity of a child who has incriminated himself at a schoolroom blackboard, she was on her feet. He guessed that she dared not linger, after taking such conscious advantage of him.

  Meanwhile, the waiter appeared with their food, a look of horror crossing his face. The Signorina leaving? Impossible! His dismay, Francis knew, was no more genuine than the long reprimand from Xenia that met it. Both were behaving as the Americans wanted them to. Only at the end of their duet did they risk beaming at one another, or rather at Jane, their victim, who had torn open a roll and was gingerly stuffing it with saltimbocca. Before she could finish, the Durdees, he sallow and blue-eyed, she pink and white with blue-tinted glasses, had made their way over to the little group.

  “I’m enchanted to see you,” said Xenia suavely, extending her hand at an angle prescribed by old books of etiquette, so as to give Mr. Durdee the choice of kissing or of shaking it. Without hesitation he shook it. “I told you to come here, remember? Did they give you something good? May I present my friends? Miss Westlake and Mr. Tanning—Mr. Durdee.”

  “And this is Mrs. Durdee. Bertha, Miss Grosz is the sculptress.”

  “I’ve been hoping to meet you in my studio, Mrs. Durdee. Won’t you sit down with us?”

  “I really must go,” Jane put in, following the newcomer’s eye to her sandwich. She picked it up, smiled bravely, and was gone.

  “They do seem to cook everything in oil,” said Mrs. Durdee, gazing vaguely after her.

  Her husband turned to Francis. “You’re Benjamin Tanning’s son, I suppose. I’ve done business with your Dad. Known him forty years.”

  Francis colored. “No,” he brought out in his most strangled voice, “as a matter of fact, there’s no relation.” If his father’s business associate had read Proust, Francis tried to reason, he would conceivably interpret this show of embarrassment as that of a young man who would suffer his life long from not being Benjamin Tanning’s son. But as it was, Mr. Durdee had glimpsed the truth.

  “Excuse me,” he said coldly. “I’d heard somewhere that the Tanning boy was in Italy.”

  Francis felt his hand trembling. He steadied it on the table. “Isn’t it curious?” he stammered. “I met him, last week, actually. He was on his way, I believe, to Munich. We met him together, Xenia,” he appealed, feeling her gaze upon him, “or was it with Jane?”

  “Oh, the fat young man with ulcers!” cried Xenia, referring to one indeed bound for Munich, but whose name she had forgotten. And, lulled by the authority in her tone, Mr. Durdee let the subject drop.

  Francis shut his eyes.

  Any given Italian, however unreal, took on a comforting plausibility next to the Durdees. They came by the thousand in search of their kind. With camera and medicines they overran a continent so barbarous that the fellow-countryman rumored to live there was tracked down, taken to dinner, spared no detail of hardship or humiliation. For discomfort itself was what they traveled towards, their goal, their vice. Mrs. Durdee’s voice assumed a lyric warmth as she spoke of thieving porters, lost luggage, food poisoning, vermin on buses. “They made us swallow our lunch whole, in order to be ready by one. At two-thirty the tour began. Well, after ten minutes in those gardens my feet were soaking wet. I said to Warren, ‘You do what you like, I’m going back to the bus.’ By evening there were little red marks all over—well, just look!”

  In Francis’s mind, wealth accounted for the phoniness of Mrs. Durdee. He could see her months hence, telling the same story to friends, their mouths voluptuously ajar, who wouldn’t laugh it off as Xenia did, as he himself did to show there was no sympathy from his quarter. He had his own catalogue of European discomforts, which straightway, by including Bertha Durdee, rendered hers comical, colorless. Here his incognito really worked. It allowed Francis to make light of those whom, judging by his recent confusion, he took with full seriousness.

  Among friends, however, a time came to play the card of truth. Alone, facing Xenia, he drew a deep breath and confessed. Benjamin Tanning was his father. He hoped she would forgive the lie her innocence had confirmed; then wondered, with a toss of his head, if she could honestly blame him for it, considering the Durdees.

  His manner gave her pause. “But why,” she finally asked, “does it upset you so? Why all this bravado?”

  “It doesn’t upset me. It bores me.”

  Xenia treated him to a lofty gleam. “Ah, but everyone knows that boredom is guilt. Now I,” she went on sententiously, “am never bored.”

  He was openmouthed. “What do you mean, boredom is guilt? My whole family bores me!”

  “Voilà!” cried Xenia. Then she took pains to shrug: it was all a matter of degree. “I’ve done the same thing myself a hundred times. People like the Durdees ask nothing better than to wear you out, especially if you have work to do. With me, it’s different. They’re customers. If he’d been a publisher,” she made her meaning clear, “then you’d have had to be nice to them.”

  Francis grew more agitated. She hadn’t understood. “You see, it’s not so much that—” But he broke off and poured a glass of wine.

  “You don’t like your father, perhaps?” suggested Xenia with an experienced laugh. “Dear Francis, I begin to understand you!”

  “Do you know my father?”

  “Not at all. You never speak of your parents. I assumed they were dead. What I meant, though, was that it’s what the whole world goes through. Some day I will tell you the anguish my mother and father caused me as a child. Enough to keep me in analysis for eight years!” A forkful of spaghetti hovered before her mouth. “Such traumas!”

  “The point is that my father,” Francis murmured, “is very rich.”

  On this their eyes met. Now she will scorn me, he thought, almost relieved. But Xenia munched placidly, quite as though waiting for him to continue. When he did not, she moistened her napkin, wiped her lips, and looked at him with a new intensity. “I see. And he gives you nothing.”

  “On the contrary,” groaned the young man, “he gives me everything! I don’t even ask for
it! It’s been mine since childhood, set up in a trust fund—in twenty trust funds, for all I know! I try to live it down, but I can’t! The Durdees show up and give it all away!”

  Xenia put down her fork and shouted with laughter. Francis gaped and blinked. In a moment they were both laughing, uncontrollably, tears in their eyes.

  “But tell me then—”

  And so he did. He told her about the divorces, about the Cheeks, about his own picture in the paper at the age of twelve—pawn in parents’ fight. He told her at length about the Buchanans, whom he confessed he didn’t envy. Oh, Larry couldn’t complain. He was very high up in the firm. But since Mr. Tanning’s retirement, after his second heart attack seven years ago, his son-in-law had rather been taken advantage of.

  It startled Francis, who was touching on most of these topics for the first time in months, to hear how easily he adopted Larry’s view of the old man. Had he himself no view? With alarm he felt the perfect blankness of his mind, like a limb gone numb. Not wanting this to show in front of Xenia, he improvised amusingly and at length on songs the Buchanans had sung to him.

  At home, at Larry’s office, every other day brought cables or telephone calls from Mr. Tanning’s latest retreat; this year, Jamaica—in darkest Irene. Why (these communiqués said) had the monthly report not reached him? Why hadn’t he been informed of a partner’s wife’s mother’s illness? Where were the figures he had requested on Bishop Petroleum? Along with these came letters to Enid, once even a copy of a letter written to Francis, full of bewilderment and self-pity. Files would be ransacked, subordinates humiliated; Enid would lie flattened by a headache, she took it so to heart—while nine times out of ten the figures, the monthly report, the memo about Mrs. X, would be lying unopened on Mr. Tanning’s desk, under a great stack of correspondence. It was now two years since he had fired his traveling secretary in a fit of economy! Economy! Poor Mrs. McBride, the nurse who had stuck it out, was forever on the verge of doing so no longer, because of the demands he made upon her.

  So that Larry, as the only member of the family who was also a partner in the firm, bore the brunt of it. He worked like a horse. On the side he handled the affairs of both Enid and Francis, administered their trust funds, invested their profits. What thanks he had from their father seemed at times so tinged with mockery—with the implication that, if Larry was treated as a clod and a convenience, he had only to look at himself to see the reason why: hard-working, humorless, happy with wife and children, all that the imaginative, polygamous Mr. Tanning had never been—“that at odd times,” Francis wound up, “I can feel Larry wishing he were in my shoes. For him, you know, I’m the classic image—the young man sowing his wild oats on the continent.”

  “Your father sounds very disagreeable,” observed Xenia.

  “But he’s not!” cried Francis in surprise. Had he given her that impression? He cast about for images to dispel it.

  Money and business, he pursued, these weren’t the main issues. No, what upset the Buchanans was rather Mr. Tanning’s love life. He gave out an air of sexual wakefulness almost indecent, considering his age and general state of health. Fern at least had discouraged that side of it—perhaps too emphatically, for her coldness had made headlines in Hearst papers—but now, in Mr. Tanning’s fourth and, God willing, final bachelorhood, what mightn’t go on at the Cottage! A nice example for Lily and the twins! There would be women all summer, dropping in, running out, women in towels, women in tears. Fern had kept them at a distance—all, apparently, but Cousin Irene. Francis silently reviewed three or four, each well preserved if not downright pretty, who would be sure to figure.

  Then without warning his mind cleared. “What I’ve forgotten to stress,” he laughed, speaking now for himself, “what makes Larry and Enid’s point of view so unnecessary,” and he took a long swallow of wine to celebrate the fact—“is how sick the old man has been!” For Xenia’s benefit he sketched in his father’s illness, how Mr. Tanning had lain with his limping heart, unable to read or see people, turning his eyes slowly, timorously upon his own life. “Instead of dying,” said Francis, “he was given time. He made wonderful use of it. He would lie awake nights remembering all the hurts, real or imaginary, he had inflicted on people, on his mother, on my mother. He would find out the whereabouts of women he’d loved as a young man, and send them gifts, or money, something to show how much he remembered and cared.”

  Xenia wiped cobwebs from her brow. “You say he isn’t dead?”

  “No, of course he isn’t dead. Why?”

  “You spoke as if he were, just then.”

  “Well,” he smiled, “all that was several years ago. He’s much better now.”

  The sculptress put her elbows on the table. “What a splendid head you have, Francis! I hadn’t realized. You must sit for me one day.”

  Francis blushed.

  She let him off easily, asking, “And does your father still send presents to women?”

  “Oh yes! More than ever. You’ll meet him,” Francis was inspired to add, “and then he’ll send you presents!” It had struck him that Xenia belonged more in Mr. Tanning’s circle than in his own.

  “Do you think so? What a matchmaker you are! You do it in just the style of my great-aunt. ‘Eugénie,’” she mimicked, “‘il faut que tu sois trés gentille envers ce jeune homme. C’est un parti, je t‘assure!’”

  “You know,” Francis went on, “in a way I do think of him as dead. He’s been so ill, he’s still so weak. He’s more like one’s grandfather.”

  Xenia frowned. He wondered if he was boring her.

  “No, really,” he almost begged, “he’s a very sweet old man!”

  “Why, he sounds perfectly charming!” she cried, beginning to laugh again. “I knew there was a mystery about you, Francis! Here we all thought you were one of us, a poor young writer trying to make ends meet on Via Margutta! If it weren’t so funny, I’d honestly be annoyed! I’m glad to see you blushing! How dare you allow me to pay my share all the times we’ve gone out!”

  He shook his head wistfully. “I loved it, I loved it. I felt it was me you liked ….”

  “Ah, now you’re being silly,” said Xenia, summoning the waiter. “Of course it’s you I like.” Francis detected on her face a faint irrepressible smile of self-congratulation, as when, in a fairy-tale, the maiden who has been kind to the toad is rewarded by its transformation into a prince. “No, no!” Xenia whisked the check beyond his reach. “I invited you to lunch.”

  “You’re dreadful!” he moaned.

  “Don’t wring your hands. Are you busy tomorrow evening?”

  “No …”

  She rose. “Then you may call for me at eight o’clock, and take me in a carriage to the Orso, which is the only cuisine soignée in Rome. I’ve been eating far too much pasta in places like this.” Xenia glanced about with distance, as if for the first time, at flies, chipped plaster, the dirty fingernails of waiters, cats. “We shall have some good French wine and I’ll be wearing a fantastic Paris dress. You see, there are things I’ve had to hide from you, thinking you were poor! Agreed? Mind you phone ahead for a table. And put on some long pants. Where do you go now?”

  “To the travel agent, I suppose.”

  “Ah! Well, the thing to do there,” Xenia needn’t have said but did, “is get yourself a cabin in first class. Then you can invite Jane and me for dinner every night! Isn’t that a splendid solution?”

  Hilarious, they parted on the street.

  He knew now that he couldn’t sail with Xenia. In whatever way he had thought, by letting her know the worst about him, to check the wildfire progress of their intimacy, he saw how miserably he had failed. She liked him more than ever. Not that Francis objected to intimacy with Xenia as a thing in itself; she was clever, wise, easygoing—but here he stopped, feeling abruptly weakened and worn and used. He did object. “I am not up to it,” he said aloud to his reflection in a shop-window, a dim transparency of a young man. He watched a woman
’s hand reach through curtains to remove from the display an oddly shaped bit of coral; it had been glowing up through his glassed image like an enthusiasm, and now it was gone. No, life was too difficult.

  It was far simpler, upon hearing that a first-class cabin could be had on a ship sailing the following evening, to take it; to spend the interim feverishly packing, telephoning a dozen people, letting Xenia and Jane believe, if they so wished, that no other passage was available for the next four weeks; finally to catch the afternoon train for Naples and glide, exhausted, out into the gleaming wastes. Francis made his arrangements with the ease of a sleepwalker.

  In twenty-four hours he had nothing left to do. With luggage already at the station, his landlady pacified, flowers sent to Xenia, a final grappa with a silent Jane—all this behind him—he strolled through the shuttered city, fingering his passport and ticket and rather too much Italian money. Had he done the wrong thing? Mightn’t he turn round, go back to the Piazza del Popólo, find Jane still at the table where he had left her, chin in hand? The sky was so blue, the buildings so astonishingly solid, all shades of orange and brown, stones beautifully streaked from their long embrace of weather—what possible meaning could his departure hold? He wasn’t leaving, he had never arrived. He had nothing to show for it, nothing of Rome had rubbed off on him.

  It made him nervous. He decided to buy something, some small token to take home, a testimonial, a scar. At such moments Francis had the knack of vanishing into the spending of money as into his own room, where none might follow. Across the square a metal shutter went up. He hastened toward the shop, only an hour left before his train.